Well! That is very interesting news indeed. I have no idea why you are posting this in the Windows forum, however.

From the looks of things, this patch was applied just after the last official release in September, meaning you will need to find a version of Bochs compiled from the current source, or compile it yourself (not easy). Version 2.6 fresh from the website will not work.

And when you find a snapshot it needs to be compiled with voodoo emulation enabled 😉

Dasher wrote:

The emulation is currently slow, but we intend
to clean up and optimize the code. Running the 3D engine in a separate thread
is also planned.

Hopefully DOSBox will be able to consume some of the updates they plan.

From the looks of if you must use latest SVN revision which you should compile by yourself and not the officially released bochs binaries. The Voodoo support is not present in the latest release yet.
- I dont have a clue how to COmpile those files 🙁 I found this page http://code.metager.de/source/search?q=voodoo&project=bochs
-I presume those are SVN sources if im not misstaken, But what exactly do I need to do with them once I download them to get bochs to understand I want to use Voodoo chipset?

Good summing up of what Jorpho wrote 😉
Best ask the Bochs people how to compile it but if you've never done it, don't bother and wait for someone to provide a compiled version or the next release...

Don't expect miracles. Last time I used Bochs, I got 486dx2 50-like speeds at best.

Ive gotten fairly good speeds in bochs, everything works fine.
- The only thing Im lacking is that 3d acceleration 😒 Looked for months for a solution but havent found one yet 😜

I should add that compiling is usually much easier in Linux than it is in Windows, though there can often be some guesswork involved. You can use Wubi to install Linux through Windows without having to muck up your hard drive, or alternatively install it on a bootable USB stick.

Hrm, from the recent Java port...

" Added support for 3dfx
Ported from MAME
Multi-threaded pure software implementation
Configurable memory options
Supports Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2, currently only Voodoo 1 works in Win95/98
Disabled by default because it requires PCI support which breaks loading OS's with Bochs"

...the last line would make me think this may be the same code from Bochs.

Weird. Given Qemu has a more mature support for win9x as guest OS, I was expecting to see it appear to the latter first. Wonder why they ported it on Bochs instead.

Orka Borka wrote:

Weird. Given Qemu has a more mature support for win9x as guest OS

It does? I would not have thought Qemu was targeting Win9x in particular at all. Please, do tell: what gives you that idea? Have you been running Win9x in Qemu yourself?

Wonder why they ported it on Bochs instead.

It is surprising to see anyone at all bothering with it.

Jorpho wrote:

Please, do tell: what gives you that idea? Have you been running Win9x in Qemu yourself?

As far as I know, it's the only virtualizer that still somewhat officially supports the win9x platform.
And, uh, yes, I have been running win98se on it, actually. I had a better experience running it than on Virtualbox. I could be wrong, but if my memory serves well (~ 2 years ago?) Virtualbox couldn't even run correctly Win95 OSR1. (I needed it for a very old avid workstation betacam deck which only supported that, on Vbox I never got past the installation)

It is surprising to see anyone at all bothering with it.

It's not very different than supporting a virtual Ensoniq sound card. Not perfect by any means, but it could be still somewhat acceptable given which guest OS they're targeting. Well known, popular video card, wide API support.

I suppose you would be limited at Fixed Shader/DX7 calls, but any higher requirements would be better served by the vmware approach.

Orka Borka wrote:

As far as I know, it's the only virtualizer that still somewhat officially supports the win9x platform.
And, uh, yes, I have been running win98se on it, actually. I had a better experience running it than on Virtualbox.

Are there special drivers available? How was your experience improved?

Nothing too peculiar.
I was working in a graphic studio specialized in converting old analog tapes to digital. If you ever worked for television during the mid-to-late '90, you know that you had to to edit your work using a betacam deck - it connected to a windows 95/98 computer, and then you could edit the movie/show/documentary by sending commands trough a DB-25 connector, while previewing on a separate screen.
Then it generated a special file which you would upload to the device, and then it sought trough the original recording and then "write" the requested sequences to a second master tape.

The only driver available was only for win9x, it wouldn't install on a Core Duo PC obviously, and virtualbox couldn't see the device. Qemu was capable of doing the job quite easily, instead.

More than often, similar legacy video editors / adapters would often crash/bluescreen on virtualbox, meanwhile Qemu was relatively more stable.

There are no "guest additions" per se on Qemu, but I was using Scitech video drivers and the some default audio/networking driver from the windows 98 cdrom.

Man I would KILL for working 3D accel in qemu/bochs. A fully working "9xbox" sorta program would solve so many of my problems.
Slap a 4GB win98 VM (With 100% working DX7 support and such!) on a USB drive.
Someday, someday.

What a coincidence, version 2.6.2 was just released yesterday. (And 2.6.1, which includes the Voodoo support, was just released in April.)

Looks like the Voodoo support is still not enabled by default, though. You can still compile it from source, however. Usually, this does not require killing anyone. 😜

Tried it today. It builds fine on Mac Os X Lion and latest Xcode, but it goes on "slideshow mode" just by running windows 98se on a i3 3.2Ghz dual core, even when compiled with all the optimizations available. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong with the config, because I remember getting somewhat better results with a several magnitudes weaker cpu. I'll see if it gets better under bootcamp.

Weird.

It actually seems to work under windows 98, but it doesn't show anything on screen - I've tried test drive 4, need for speed II se and Andretti Racing (with the 3dfx patch) and they seems to reach ingame, but the only confirmation I have is the audio ouput.

By the way, even under Windows 7 my experience with bochs has been ...quite miserable, to put it mildly. On my configuration it seems a bit slower than a pentium 90.
Both Need For Speed and Andretti racing were playable on software at roughly 20-25 fps with low resolution/details.

By the way, given the code seems to be relatively easy to port, would be that hard for someone to write a wrapper based on it?

In other words, a glide2x.dll file that could be used as pure software emulation natively, or inside vmware/ virtualbox without requiring support from the emulator in first place.